Havoc Pennington outlined recently the steps required to bring the freedesktop.org effort --to unite the specs/protocols of the X11-based DEs for better interoperability-- closer to its goal. Read more of the discussion in their list. On other X11 news, XFCE 4.0-RC2 was released for testing. UPDATE: Here is a screenshot of XFCE 4-RC2 running on Red Hat Linux "Severn" beta.